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Instead this is a review of Kagamine Ren/Lin cover album by Shimoda Asami – because as I’ve said when the news about the release of this CD came out, I’m more excited by this CD than Ultimate Diamond from the get-go. I know Nana-chan had broken records etc etc, and even with both albums on hand I find myself coming back to this a whole lot more. Plus many others had already reviewed Ultimate Diamond, so I don’t feel the need to preach to the choir either.

I must first confess though, I actually haven’t heard any of the original Vocaloid versions of the songs before the announcement of the CD. Even at that, I’ve only listened to the ones that I’ve linked to on this blog and maybe one or two others at most. So I’m going into the songs with a fairly clean slate.

The album overall has some pretty good variety in its music – and anyone who’s read my CD impressions should know that I LOVE variety from my seiyuu singers CDs. There’s a couple of ballads, a few cute songs, anisong, normal j-pop and electronic. Asapon also didn’t pull any punches when it comes to showing off her voice abilities – throughout the entire CD she employs different tones and vocal range depending on the style of the songs, whether it is a slightly more mature tone rarely heard from her thus far (頑張ろうよ, Soundless voice, ジェミニ), her signature child-like playful one (おてんば姫の歌♪,イタズラムスメ), mimicking the surreal and robotic Vocaloid voice (ココロ, 炉心融解) and even employing two completely different tones within the same song (リンリンシグナル, South North Story). Some of these songs were obviously not composed with the limit of a human pop song singer in mind and contains some pretty crazy sections where the notes just keeps climbing higher and higher, such as in 頑張ろうよ (Ganbarouyo) and 炉心融解 (Roshinyoukai). Asapon manages to pull off those notes though, the result is eerily good that one can’t help to think that if it’s really her or they just employed the help from the Vocaloid software.

On the flip side though, the major failing of the album is that it’s hard to get a feel of a particular music style for Asapon – the album is a cover of songs not belonging to her and it shows. Asapon did a great job covering the Vocaloid songs and she plays into the different characters and stlye of the songs with ease, but none of the songs felt truly representative of her own singing style. As stated by the album this is Kagamine Rin/Len featuring Shimoda Asami, so I suppose we are to treated this as a character image album, rather than a personal album. It doesn’t pose much of a problem for a first release as the priority now is just to get her name out there in the most effective manner possible (and I do firmly believe that using the Vocaloid name here is an effective marketing strategy), but if Asapon is serious about getting a personal singing career she would need to find her own image later.

Overall the album is very solid. Fans of Asapon has no excuse in not picking this one up. Others thinking of dipping their toes in should find comfort in that the singing is good and there’s enough music variety in there and you are bound to find something you like.

Top picks of the album in no particular order:
頑張ろうよ, イタズラムスメ, リンリンシグナル, Soundless voice, 炉心融解, South North Story

If you’re still on the fence about the Kagamine Rin/Len cover album by Shimoda Asami, you can now head over to the official homepage and check out samples of all 13 song at the discography section.

Currently I would say the songs リンリンシグナル (Rin Rin Signal), Daybreak, Soundless Voice catches my attention the most. Since I’ve became used to listening to Asapon’s Futami Ami/Mami playful and nasal singing voice a lot due to im@s, these 3 songs seems to provide the different angle, the more serious and mature angle, to her voice which I’m looking forward to sample. I also like in Rin Rin Signal where Asapon switches between the Rin and Len voice.

The CD goes on sale on the 10th of June.

The Shimoda Asami Channel at Nicodouga has also been updated with a video of the CD jacket photo session. Must watch for fans of Asapon.

In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Lantis has announced that it will hold a two day outdoor concert at Fujikyu Highland Conifer Forest on September 26th and 27th. The official homepage can be found here.

Hailing itself to be the first ever big size outdoor anisong concert, the venue’s capacity is up there with the likes of Super Arena capable of seating some 18000 people. The line up of artists contains a lot of familiar names that we’ve all seen at Animelo, some other fairly well-known/experience artists/seiyuu, plus a few more of the less active seiyuu artists that usually won’t be seen much at live events, let alone one of this kind of scale. With Kageyama Hironobu/JAM Project at the helms leading there shouldn’t be much to worry about, and I fully expect this will look and feel a lot like Animelo, though we are obviously lacking in a couple of the big acts of Animelo from other music labels. The line up is by no means shabby though it remains to be seen how well Lantis can pull something of this scale and size off all by themselves. One thing is almost certain though, with only Lantis behind this event, there shouldn’t be any rights issues and we can probably expect that they will release this event on disk sometime in the future. Just hope that it is not as bad as the 2007 Animelo disk set that Lantis was responsible for.

When they missed the original May 1st release date last Friday and replaced the icon with an “preparing release” I’ve figured that they ran into a little problem but with the long Golden Week holiday in Japan starting last weekend it would mean the earliest we would see the song would be when everyone got back to work (which is today), and true enough the song is now available on the Japanese iTunes Store here. It’s an iTunes Plus song (ie no DRM, unlike the US store the Japanese store has not gone completely DRM free so it is not a given to be iTunes Plus) and cost 200yen. Although I’ve tried searching from the other stores such as US/UK/AU it doesn’t seem to be available internationally. So if you really want to buy it and can’t wait for the album release you might have to jump through the usual hoops such as to buy a Japanese iTunes Store point card from exporters.

As for the song itself, it’s a fairly catchy song and Asapon managed to keep it fairly close to the voice that is produced by the Vocaloid software, which is a good sign of what to expect from the upcoming album. Here’s a sample of the song.

On a related note, the second video for the Shimoda Asami Channel on NicoDouga is now available, and a new track to be included in the Prism album is revealed to be “soundless voice” by ひとしずく (Hitoshizuku), whom to the surprise of the many NicoDouga fans turns out to be a female user of the Vocaloid software. The song itself is a slow sorrowful ballad and is a Ren song (the boy voice).

The channel is here and viewing the videos doesn’t require registration. Though if you want to become a member of the channel’s community (and thus be able to comment on the videos of the channel) you will need to have a NicoDouga account.

Also Asapon’s first cover of a Kagamine Rin song イタズラムスメ (Itazuramusume, original can be heard here) will be made available on the iTunes Music Store (hopefully *not* limited to the Japan store) on May 1st.

So like Discotheque, the latest PV was leaked on the Internet again.

Unlike those crazy erojiji fangirls whom are suffering from dizzy-ness due to blood lost from the nose, let’s look at this PV and song objectively.

The first thing which strikes me about this song and PV is that feels like an act which a visual-kei J-rock band would do. With Nana’s continuing re-appearance at NHK’s Music Japan program (she’s going on for the third time in May) couple with the song that is veering away from the usual anisong image in the public’s mind, I think it’s fairly safe to say that she has set her sight firmly on the market outside her usual anime otaku fanbase and is testing waters with something that is a little more plateable on the mainstream scale (I don’t think it would be wrong for me to say that visual-kei J-rock is less on the extreme end of the mainstream spectrum than anisong). Who can blame her now that she is the indesputable top artist in the anisong sphere, there’s nowhere else for her to go except branching out as the otakusphere is only so big. That said, historically speaking, this sort of branching had all been fairly disastrous since technically speaking, mainstream and otaku taste simply don’t mix very well (which should be fairly obvious just by the very definition of these words alone), and catering to either one usually means the other will be alienated. So it remains to be seen how well Nana can balance her acts from now on.

As for the PV and song – Do I like it? It’s not bad, but I’m not quite as excited as the crazy erojiji fangirls. Does that mean my masculinity is in question? That or Nana is getting really good at turning girls gay.

Official site here.

As I’ve written in my 2008 review post, Shimoda “Asapon” Asami was one of the two great seiyuu discoveries for me last year. So I’m really excited about this album (perhaps even more so than Nana’s upcoming “Ultimate Diamond”). With the recent success of several ameteur release of Hatsune Miku albums, it’s not too surprising that more people are trying to make real cash off Vocaloid music. Although one could argue that part of the charm of Vocaloid songs is the slightly mechanical tone of the voices, but it’s also undeniable that there’s a lot of demand for renedition of the songs by real people/singers. Out of all the 3 Vocaloid sound bank seiyuu contributors – Fujita Saki as Miku, Shimoda Asami as Rin/Len and Asakawa Yuu as Ruka, the sound produced by Rin/Len’s remains the closest to the vocal range that Shimoda Asami herself is able to actually sing in (unlike say, Fujita Saki as Miku). On top of that, Shimoda Asami has an excellent track record in singing a wide variety of songs as well as being a capable singer, combined with some spill-over from her army of fans on NicoDouga (no doubt also realising this, the PR machine plans to start a Shimoda Asami channel on NicoDouga to promote the album) due to her role as Futami Ami/Mami of Idolmaster, this album could potentially be a big hit and rip up the charts similiar to the other recent Hatsune Miku albums. Although this is going to be Shimoda Asami’s first solo album release, the formula here seems to contain enough of the stuff that attracts good publicity to give her a solid boost in her career. Finally, Shimoda Asami herself will pen lyrics to the title song “Prism”, which is a completely original song.

The album will go on sale on 10th June.

EDIT: Youtube links to a few songs that will be covered:

ココロ　(Kokoro)

リンリンシグナル (Rin Rin Signal)

Finally for good measure what Shimoda Asami sounds like live. スタ→トスタ→ (Start Star) from Idolmaster.

Animelo 2009 RE:Bridge

I missed the livecast, but thanks to everyone’s live-spamming of this site (lol), I got to know the initial line-up for Animelo 2009 without even having to check the official site! User-generated content FTW? Anyway, with them going to the lengths of setting up an English site, I guess keeping up with this year’s line-up will be much simplier. Now just a summary of what artist we have thus far:

22nd August: Ayane, Ishikawa Chiaki, ELISA, JAM Project, Chihara Minori
23rd August: Sakakibara Yui, Savage Genius, Hirano Aya, Mizuki Nana, Yonekura Chihiro

It seems to me that Saturday currently lacks the 萌え idol seiyuu singers while Sunday is lacking the 燃え GAR/male singers. So I’m predicting that they will probably do something about that to balance the two days up in the upcoming annoucements. With Nana-chan and Hirano Aya both on Sunday (FWIW, they have gone head-to-head on the same day before when Aya appeared as special guest in 2007, though I guess most people had sealed that memory away due to that horrendous punk version of Bouken Desho Desho) it’s going to be a sell out for all the rabid fanboys and it would probably be just short of a riot when it comes to them fighting over tickets. If it is up to me I would think that they would do a temporary reunion of Yamato Nadeshiko (Yukarin and Hoc-chan) on Saturday to get the fanboys to step and craw over each others’ smelly bodies for Saturday’s session too. For GAR singers, well, I’m not that knowledgible in those, but I wouldn’t mind if they bring back GRANRODEO or something along that line. Oh and if m.o.v.e makes another appearance, please sing something else besides Gamble Rumble. You have an entire catalog of good Initial D theme songs, use them!

First iDOLM@STER Concert Tour

On other concert news, the iM@S girls are going to have their first ever concert tour in 4 major cities in May. The cities they are visiting are in the order of Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka and final stop at Tokyo. Appearance of the seiyuu are all over the place though from the initial announcements – like Takahashi Chiaki “Chiaking” only appearing at the Tokyo session and Shimoda Asami “Asapon” at Fukuoka only, plus the usual absence of Ochiai Yurika “Yurishii” and Kugimiya Rie “Kugyuu~”. Unless they change the line up it just means that it would be impossible to see to all the performances in one session. Someone made a reference guide for the line-up and I’ve just PS the English bits myself. While Tokyo looks the most delicious (as expected, and competition for tickets will be fierce), the lack of Asapon is going to be a real let down for me.

Nana-chan New Album on 20th May

So we now have a date, apparently it will contain 15 tracks, and the first press comes with a DVD of the secret event for Trickster which had Nana roping in a bunch of her other seiyuu friends such as Sugita Tomokazu, Suzumura Kenichi, Sawashiro Miyuki, and Kuwatani Natsuko and TEH Wakamoto (even though only as narration) did a play. I wonder if the epicness of the DVD will boost the sales even more by getting a few more sales from the fans of the other seiyuu?

Following closely to her getting number one spot on the Oricon Daily Singles chart with Shinai, Nana-chan now has another record to add to her list of musical achievements – this time for her Blu-ray disk set of the Live Fighter concert　”Live Fighter Blue X Red Side” being the first ever music related Blu-ray disk to have sold more than 10,000 copies in Japan (source).

While this is good news for Nana-chan and her fans, I think this says a lot more about the adaptation rate of Blu-ray in the general population and the condition of the music industry rather than the success of Nana-chan. If no other artists had sold more than 10,000 copies of their concerts or music clip Blu-rays up till now, if I was to be working for someone like SME or Avex I won’t be sleeping well at night that’s for sure.

I uploaded my version without the letterbox – just because I can.

An acoustic version of this song will rock, maybe they’ll do one in the next concert tour. For the upcoming one, they need to get Agematsu Mika to come back and make epicness like last time.

I still haven’t seriously watched White Album, probably never will either.